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Artissima 11, Torino

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Press release

The library space is the crucial hub of Yann Sérandour’s activities. As material, source of inspiration and studio, the library also represents, for this artist, a preferred space for the circulation of his works. Whether they take the form of inserts, publications, prints or installations, these are all part and parcel of an approach which he describes as interstitial, reactivating, as it does, and extending the praxis of other artists based on methods which have to do with supplements, interferences and shifts. Otherwise put, they issue from a work of reading, with all the dynamics of interpretation and appropriation that this term might suggest: “I use existing works so as to project interests peculiar to myself, as any reader of novels does”, the artist points out.

Since his earliest works, Yann Sérandour’s area of investigation has focused mainly on the conceptual artistic production of the 1960s and 1970s, extending the work of artists like Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner, Raymond Hains and Yves Klein, but his most recent projects are set in a broadened historical arena. The installation Madeleine pénitente (2011) thus has to do with the copy, today installed in the grounds of the Domaine de Chamarande, in the Paris region, of a sculpture by the neo-classical artist Antonio Canova, shown at the 1808 Salon and whose fingers were broken as it was being transported from Italy, before being restored. Intrigued by the hypotheses put forward by an art historian about the similar absence of fingers in the copy, Yann Sérandour suggested to an art restorer that he sculpt the missing parts, thus adding a new stage to the movements and incidents that have marked the work’s life. For its part, the series of prints on aluminium called World Mirrors (2011) takes as its point of departure a sequence of black-and-white reproductions taken from an old Sotheby’s catalogue, presenting mirrors in differing styles from various periods—Louis XV, Queen Anne, George III, Empire, and the like. By reproducing these vignettes in the actual size of the objects, World Mirrors emphasizes in particular the absence of images reflected within the reproduced frames, having used a nebulous grey, in the original images, to mask the reflection in the mirrors of the places photographed. By being involved in the edges of the work, in its reproductions, and in the commentaries surrounding it, Yann Sérandour’s praxis broaches art history like a narrative that can be forever amended. “My works,”, he says, “fit fraudulently into this narrative, the better to thwart its linearity and introduce feedback effects”.

Christophe Gallois